
J. Cole is a rapper from Fayetteville, North Carolina, who was very motivated to climb to the top of the rap world.  He usually puts strong messages into his songs instead of just talking about drugs and crime.  Therefore, when making the music video for the song Crooked Smile, he took real-world issues into consideration.  In this video he takes problems such as police violence and the war on drugs head on with his color contrast, shot angles, and lyrics.  By taking this approach to activism it is much easier for him to get the attention of the younger generation.  He performed this song on tour and was able to ‘preach’ to thousands and thousands of young people for almost an entire year.  In J Cole’s Crooked Smile music video, he uses the motif of race to show that America is still divided when it comes to skin color.


To begin, J Cole attacks?? the problem of police violence in this music video.  The video shows J Cole at home hiding a very small bag of marijuana in his shoes.  Later that day, his family comes home to celebrate a younger sister’s birthday.  Once the little girl goes to bed, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) shows up and the noise wakes up the girl.  As she pokes her head out of the bedroom the camera goes to a shot in between over-the-shoulder and Point of View.  These shots were used to give the perception of the little girl with the lethality of the cop in her vision.  Once the white DEA officer gets a half-second glimpse of the girl, he shoots her dead.  It is obvious what J Cole was going for with this decision because there were two other black officers in the group but they had the white officer kill the girl to make a point.  This shot in the music video also has a lot of light contrast as talked about in the Color Theory.  This makes it difficult to not look at the officer.  Clearly, J Cole wanted to draw attention towards the white DEA officer with the gun so he used a technique called framing.  He made the outside “frame” of the shot very dark and only used light shining on the officer as if to point to him and say, ‘Look here!’.  This is important because it exemplifies the violence between the races as an innocent little girl is about to be killed.     


The music video opens with a series of medium shots of the black J Cole and the white DEA officer getting ready in the morning.  These shots set the scene of each man in their respective bathrooms and cuts between the two with short clips of each of them brushing their teeth and washing their faces.  Then, it has a pair of white hands cup water from a sink and then has J Cole splash the water into his face with a close up shot.  This is included to try to fuse the two men together and say there is nothing different between the two.  At this point in the video the viewer knows nothing about the men therefore the only difference is skin color, in which J Cole is trying to diffuse.  In this particular screen shot the color theory is used to cast a shadow on the father and daughter.  Here, the viewer can’t tell if this person is black or white, which at this point seems to be the only objective J Cole has with this music video.  However, it is clear that the two people in the shot are both smiling and both making direct eye contact.  Clearly, this is a couple of happy humans living their lives.  J Cole takes the entire idea of race out of the question with this shot because it just isn’t visible.   

One powerful line from Crooked Smile that J Cole adds is, “Hey officer man, we don't want nobody getting killed, just open up that cell, let my brother out of jail.”  When connected to the music video this says that J Cole doesn’t want anything violent to happen to anyone.  Then, when he sees his ‘brother(s)’ go to jail, for minor drug charges, he wants them to get out since they didn’t do anything violent.  However, the ones that get to jail are lucky because they don’t have to experience the violence that he sees some black people go through when being arrested.

One of the most important lines in the song when reading the lyrics is, “We ain't picture perfect but we worth the picture still.”  He wanted to express that he understands that our society has its flaws, but he still believes it’s worth the effort to fix it as much as possible.  J Cole tried to incorporate the current race issue this country has in these music videos in different ways.  He wanted to express the racism that is still picking apart this country on a daily basis, and I think he was able to express these problems fairly well.  

Before watching these music videos and analyzing the lyrics, I didn’t think much about the songs other than they had a good beat.  However, after going back and looking more in-depth, I was able to see the messages that J Cole was putting into his music.  If it’s trying to encourage a younger generation, or attacking a 300-year old problem, J Cole turned heads with these songs and music videos.  Many rappers use their songs just to talk about drugs and crimes and get a good beat, but J Cole uses his platform productively to influence as much as he can. 
